Incorporating Multidisciplinary Design Optimization into Spacecraft Systems Engineering

Systems Engineering (SE) and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) are usually regarded as two different aspects of spacecraft design. This paper investigates the problem of merging these two fields for the improvement of the spacecraft system design. The SE and MDO processes are described with emphases on their principles, models and...

Utilizing Uncertainty Multidisciplinary Design Optimization for Conceptual Design of Space Systems

With progress of space technology and increase of space mission demand, requirements for robustness and reliability of space systems are ever-increasing. For the whole space mission life cycle, the most important decisions are made in the conceptual design phase, so it is very crucial to take uncertainties into consideration in this initial...

Status of the fast mission: Micro-satellite formation flying for technology, science and education

FAST (Formation for Atmospheric Science and Technology demonstration) is a cooperative Dutch Chinese formation flying mission led by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands and Tsinghua University in China. It is expected to be the first international micro-satellite formation flying mission to achieve objectives in three...

Fractionated spacecraft: The new sprout in distributed space systems

This paper provides a survey of current state-of-the-art technologies of fractionated spacecraft, a new architecture for distributed space systems. The survey covers six aspects: architecture, networking, wireless communication, wireless power transfer, distributed computing, and planned missions implementing this architecture. As a result of...

Mission Design of the Dutch-Chinese FAST Micro-Satellite Mission

The paper treats the mission design for the Dutch-Chinese FAST (Formation for Atmospheric Science and Technology demonstration) mission. The space segment of the 2.5 year mission consists out of two formation flying micro-satellites. During the mission, new technologies will be demonstrated and, using spectropolarimeter and altimeter payloads on...

Conceptual Design of the FAST-D Formation Flying Spacecraft

The paper presents the latest results in the design of FAST-D, the Dutch micro-satellite for the Dutch–Chinese FAST (Formation for Atmospheric Science and Technology demonstration) formation flying mission. Over the course of the 2.5 year mission, the two satellites, FAST-D and FAST-T, will demonstrate various new technologies and perform...

Design of guidance laws for lunar pinpoint soft landing

Future lunar missions ask for the capability to perform precise Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) to the selected landing sites on the lunar surface. This paper studies the guidance issues for the lunar pinpoint soft landing problem. The primary contribution of this paper is the design of descent guidance law based on the Pontryagin maximum...

Design of a sliding mode fuzzy controller for the guidance and control of an autonomous underwater vehicle